Prodding an Innovative Company to Innovate

Dear Mr. Jassy:

Subject: A request that Kindle Direct Publishing allow video and audio tags in Enhanced Typesetting

Imagine if the Harry Potter ebook series included multimedia eNovels, with video, audio, music cues, and JavaScript to animate graphics. What Harry Potter fan wouldn’t love an ebook that merged the novels with the computer games, clips from the movies, and additional footage created just for the book, and even accessed Alexa to turn on appliances or trigger phone calls or texts at certain points in the story?

The multimedia eNovel would open new avenues for creativity, without affecting at all the current state of the traditional text-only novel. The two forms of fiction would exist side-by-side, with the multimedia eNovel presented as a new medium—the mNovel, or something similar.

The ability to enhance the eNovel with media is available now because the epub3 format already supports a long list of features. That part of the technology has already been created, and I can imagine that the W3C Advisory Board and the DAISY Consortium would encourage KDP to expand its support to include all of the features. Currently there is a long list of features that aren’t supported by the Kindle.

Because a typical multimedia eNovel would be somewhere around 90% unformatted text, the fixed-layout format isn’t practical. Too much of the book would be displayed as fixed text on a fixed page. What is needed is a form of reflowable text that allows carefully formatted media to flow along with it.

I used the HTML-editor apps Sigil and Calibre to create my own multimedia eNovel, and all of the features worked correctly in the apps’ preview panels. When testing my ebook on Kindle, I compiled lists of what features work and which don’t when viewing an ebook. I submitted the lists and other information to KDP Customer Support, and after a lengthy exchange of emails, I received the final reply “As per our technical team, the audio/video tags aren’t supported in reflowable format currently. However, I will take your concern as feedback and pass it on to my business team for consideration in the future.” Everyone with whom I corresponded was very helpful, and the most recent case number is #13853778 in case you’re interested. But I had received the same type of reply on 5 November 2021. I suspect that the topic was discussed by the business team, and the decision was made to maintain the current status.

I do believe Star Wars fans would be excited by the availability of a new kind of product, a multimedia eNovel with clips from the films, music cues, and special effects zinging across the page. On my own I was able to, for example, animate fireworks splashing across a page in my ebook while an orchestral anthem plays, triggered by tapping a ► play button embedded in the text at a specific point in the story. The effect is fun. It enhances the reading experience. Imagine what Disney, with their resources, could do with an eNovel. But no studio or publisher is currently able to provide that kind of experience with eNovels in the Kindle Store. It's as if KDP is keeping a finger on a vein and saying that the blood shouldn’t flow there. Please consider having KDP expand the number of epub3 features supported by the Kindle.

Thanks very much.